The Travel Marketing Podcast

This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.

All right. So today I had the opportunity to interview my friend, Matthew Barker. He's the founder of Horizon Guides, which is a direct consumer, zero commission advertising channel for travel businesses.
The reason I was excited to interview Matthew is because really he's not a travel business, he's a marketer, but he's built what looks like a travel business on the outside because they write travel content and then they do a CPC, a cost per click model with travel agencies and travel suppliers. So I would say the key most important parts of this conversation are when to use AI versus when to write something yourself, scaling a content marketing organization, and then finally just being strategic about testing new marketing channels and diversifying.

So I'm excited to dive in with Matthew. We'll get started.

Okay. So, Matt, you decided to start this with me by telling me it's 8 p.m. for you and you're not the sharpest right now. Is that correct?

Right.
I would rarely call myself the sharpest any time of day, especially 8pm on a Tuesday.

In which case you're in good company because I operated about 60% capacity, about 90% of the time. So I get it.
Super excited to jump in today. I'm glad we got to catch up and actually finally meet in person at Phocuswright in Barcelona. You said you've been doing some traveling. Where were you off to last?

We went to Corfu immediately before Phocuswright actually. And then we just spent a weekend camping in a wet field with a leaky tent, not far from Stratford of Shakespeare fame.

Stratford upon Avon.

Stratford upon Avon, that's right. Yeah.
Yeah, it's been fun and games. We've got two young kids. So traveling these days takes a bit more effort than it used to.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Especially when the tent is leaking.

Yeah. Especially when it's raining in the tent is leaking. Yeah, I get it.
I want to talk a little bit about Horizon Guides. It's a, this is a different type of interview than we typically do. We typically interview operators of travel companies. Tell me if I understand correctly, so horizon guides started as an agency and then built into a content company. That's mostly travel con or actually here rather than me trying to explain it. Why don't you explain it?

Yeah, right. If you want to go way back in time, that's actually true. Yeah. So we first started doing what you do, SEO consultancy. This was way back when Panda was the talk of the town, Google Panda and Google Penguin. And people first started waking up to just the concept of content and inbound marketing, all these things first, can’t sure my age really, but this is like when these things first started to happen, my business partner who we later got married, but we started a very small boutique consultancy working with smallish tour operators, helping them get their heads around what all of this stuff meant, right?
There were people that had been doing old school SEO, you know, links spam and white text on white background style SEO and had been making it work for a long time.

Those were the days.

Right. Yeah. Take me back.

You say it with such a negative view. That was when it was so easy. Oh my God.

Yeah. I mean, seriously, like I was working for, so my wife and I met working at a tour operator in South America and they were like 10 years old at that point. And they built a very strong, very healthy business like the old school SEO and you probably remember the time like that kind of came to fairly sudden halt. And suddenly people were talking about like, you know, this thing called content. What does that mean? What's content marketing? What's inbound marketing? And I have a background. The reason I found myself in, if you really want to go back in time, the reason I found myself in, the reason I was in South America is because I was trying to start a career as a travel journalist.
So I kind of had the vocabulary and a bit of the know-how for this stuff that was emerging. And we did quite well in that first period. What we quickly realized was we were doing this pretty much the exact same thing for every client, right? Create a piece of content, build a campaign to promote that content, build remarketing lists, build email lists, do your SEO and so on. And it was very repetitive and something that we realized we could productize.
And that in a very roundabout kind of way is the genesis of Horizon Guides. We kind of realized that if we did the content creation, the work of publishing ourselves, we could do it better. We'd have to make fewer compromises. We could do it at more scale. We could do it faster. That would be easier. And so instead of creating branded content assets for these businesses to use, we just did it, started doing it for ourselves on a platform that was originally called Horizon Travel Press and later became Horizon Guides.

Got it. So you're basically, you have a model where you're doing all the advertising and marketing to one website and people are subscribed to receive benefits from that.

Exactly right. So we aggregate all of the hard work of content creation and audience building and marketing. We do all of that in one place and bring in.

So let me pivot a little bit to July 9th, 2024. You know, obviously a big part of your platform lately has been defending the work you're doing as it stands up next to computer written content, AI generated content. I am not going to beat around the bush, just going to go directly into it.

Yeah.

No, you're not a huge fan of representing it in place of what you're doing. I know that you've said that there's augmented opportunities to use generative AI and other forms of it. Obviously other forms of it are not competing with you at all, but let's take your guides, right? What's a weird niche destination?

So all of them really, that's the whole MO. So like walking holidays in Armenia is a current one or safaris in Namibia. And then even we sort of drill down within that so we're kind of looking at
locally owned safari camps in Tanzania or Kenya. So we kind of drilling down as niche as we can.
I mean, like we do experiential travel, which is an awful phrase. Never fully defined it myself, but if you go to a place to do an activity, it is usually a good fit for us. So we do lots of hiking and walking, lots of safari.

Got it.

So like trekking in Bhutan. Okay. You want to go trekking in Bhutan? We've got a guide for that and you'll find us quite prominently in the search.

Okay. So you got, you're coming up in search. That's so your district, because you basically have turned yourself into a travel company to the extent that anybody else, any other reseller is a travel company, you're not taking a commission. You've got a subscription model, right?

But well, I mean, it's a very straightforward advertising model. So cost per click or a cost per lead advertising model.

Yeah. Which is, you know, similar to like companies like I can think Tour Radar, Travel Stride.

Not quite. There's a big difference in that they are intermediaries. So they're sales channels.

Yeah. Right.

And we're a marketing channel. Got it. So we don't intermediate between the customer and the supplier. We just connect, we refer customers directly to the suppliers.

That was actually from my memory. That was Travel Stride's old model. I know they've pivoted a bit since then.

Right. Yeah. So let's talk about like in your marketing decisions in the context of continuing to write a lot of human written content, which a lot of marketers are running away from right now, because it's so easy to write non-human written content. Walk me through your thought process on why you're sticking to your guns.

Well, I mean, partially out of just peak headed stubbornness.

Okay. We're having an honest conversation today. No, I'm kidding.

Lots of people would dress up that answer in different ways, but like we look at what was happening when ChatGPT first exploded out on the scene and you know, we had a lot of, a lot of conversations and thinking and soul searching about what we should do. And I don't beat around, I don't hide, like we looked into how we could adopt it, into how we could use some of that in content creation. I'm certainly no Luddite or denier of this technology.
We've fully explored all of it and we continue to do so, like benchmark what we do against what you can get from LLMs all the time.
And this is what we were talking about in Barcelona, right? There are a number of fundamental things that the hypesters and the pro, the big pro LLM people do not have an answer for, or do not have convincing answers for. And that is that quite often this stuff, well, first of all, this stuff is rarely, if ever, good enough, right? And LLM doesn't know what a fact is or what quality is or what any of these things mean, doesn't know what anything means and the output is okay. Right? It's got uses, but for publishing the kind of travel advice that our readers come to us for, it's no good. It doesn't have the level of detail. It doesn't have the level of up to date accuracy, and most importantly, it doesn't have anything of any of the human attributes that our readers are looking for.
Our readers want to know that they're reading advice from a person who has been there and is talking from experience.

I got you. Here's what I'd say, so I'm going to put that, what you just said as a, let's put that as a fact into this conversation. Let's just accept what you've said for truth and try to move beyond that and talk about the reason people have been using AI is for scale, right?
You make money, the more impressions you have, you make money, the more impressions you get, you make more money, the more clicks out you get to your advertisers and to get more clicks. You need more content. We've got clients.

And this kind of cook. Yeah. This comes to the crux. This is a very good question. A very good angle for the conversation because one of the reasons this has been relatively easy for us to adapt to, or at least easy for us to arrive at this position that we've got is that we've never been a high scale, high volume content firm.
We did raise VC money, but not a lot. We've never been or tried to be or even considered ourselves to be like a culture trip, extreme high scale, high volume content creation. Our numbers are actually quite small in the scheme of things, you know, I think we have something like 70 or 1000 monthly users, which is a publishing business is bugger all that's, you know, on face value. That's very small numbers. What matters to us is, and more importantly, our advertisers is the focus of the content of the subject matter.
So we don't care about impressions and numbers and vanity metrics. What we care about is if there are users who are searching for a particular destination or activity that we've got content for them. And that's how we can generate referrals that are actually worth what we're charging because our customers, our advertisers won't pay us for crap referrals. We won't have our advertisers for long. If the quality of what we send them is no good.

Can I ask you a question about that in the context of your funnel focus where in the funnel you focus? So what I'm thinking is, you know, when we look at content and we look at the inspiration planning, booking being the three stages where we can actually influence revenue.
Where does most of your content sit? Is it someone who hasn't decided in their destination? Is it someone that hasn't?

No, and this is one of the things that we've always been late, pretty lazy focused on. We've never really been interested in the top of the funnel. I mean, I've qualified that more than it should have been. We've never been interested in the top of the funnel. We've never really taken social media seriously, which probably is, was, has been in hindsight has been a bit of a mistake, but we've never were loosely considered the, you know, those top of funnel inspiration type activities and channels have never been important to our business.
We are really good at meeting people when they are in market, they know what they want to do, they know where they want to go, but they need a bit more education, they need a few more details on that travel decisions. So they're right at the cusp. They're in that planning stage, the lower end of the planning stage. They're ready to make a decision to find a travel supplier and go ahead and start booking.

Okay. So they're moving from the planning to the booking stage in most of your targeting. Have you found that focus to be limiting at all?

Well, I mean, like I said, our traffic numbers aren't stratospheric. So in that regard, you would say, yes, like we could have more traffic, but it wouldn't necessarily be the type of traffic that I try to generate.

Yeah. I mean, because the click-through rate is going to drop substantially. Do you get any feedback from your customer? So like, this is all the reason I'm asking these questions is it feeds into does creating content answering questions at the planning to booking phase drive conversions. So my follow up is when you're talking to your advertisers. What is their experience typically? Are they seeing conversions or what types more conversions than others?

Yeah. So like when we talk to our advertisers or potential advertisers, we talk about ourselves in comparison to PPC channels, right? So typically these are people that spend an awful amount of money on Google ads.

Well, yeah, we managed a couple million dollars in that quarter.

So, yeah, right. So it's a huge amount of money sloshing around.

Yeah.

And particularly for our cohort, our target segment. Like this is such a big industry, right? And I would describe it more as a collection of industries in one, but the people that we, our sweet spot are those tour operators. They're probably still owner operated tour operators. They've got decent money to spend on marketing, but they are not quite big enough where they would need a propellant to come in and handle it for them.
They're probably trying to run their Google campaigns themselves, maybe, or they'll have an agency or freelancers doing it for them. You know the sort of people, right? They've got money, but it's very easy for them to waste most of it, if not all of it.

There's no good down market offering in the agency space for travel companies. To all my friends who run agencies that target travel and tourism that are running their agency fees lower, let me modify that. Non-US labor, like if you're hiring in the U S you have to have a premium price for delivering enough time to pay people and do the work. And I'd like that you have a down, what sort of like a down market offering for travel companies.

Yeah, look, our pitch is you probably are spending and wasting a lot of money on Google ads. You are spending a hell of a lot of money in commissions to OTAs. We kind of sit in between those two categories operate like an OTA in that kind of aggregation sense. But we give you referrals on a cost per click, which is an attractive solution for some of these smaller operators.

Is there a cost per click range? Does it vary by type of market? How sophisticated does that model?

Actually, it's incredibly unsophisticated. So we charge it. It's incredibly unsophisticated. We charge a flat, currently charge a flat fee per click $1.20.

Yeah, that's incredibly inexpensive.

Right. And that's regardless of destination. Or, I mean, like if you want to go by Safari keywords, you spend like 10 times that on Google.

I would say on Google. Yeah. I mean, it's been a while since I've looked at it. I mean, I have to go back and look and see how it's integrated into the article. Cause I mean, like if you send someone to a website for $1.20, if you like, that's the thing that I keep coming back to is how do you scale your business? That is such a manual process. How do you scale?

Yeah, it's not that manual really as briefly as possible on the back end. So the bit that is very hard to scale and I like it that way is the content creation and we like what we were talking about earlier, like we're never going to be in the business of high scale, high volume content creation that takes time and effort, and we use a lot of AI in researching this stuff, the AI never goes into the finished product. That just takes time and a lot of effort and a lot of money. We work with the most prominent travel journalists in their destinations. These are professional content creators, authors, journalists. They don't come cheap, and that's good. That's the way it should be. The bit that scales quite easily is on the inventory side.
So tour operators can come to us, they can list their tours, their products, and that we can create and publish inventory very quickly and very easily. And then that is dynamically into alongside the guides, but also on a kind of marketplace that we have as well. So you can go if you're researching tracks in Bhutan, you will see inventory from our partners with links to their site, to their products, or you can go through to our marketplace and you can see all of our tracks to Bhutan or all of our tracks to the whole rest of the world if you want. And that is quite a low friction, easier to scale process, getting that inventory.

And do you charge on the click out to the supplier's website or the click to their content on your website?

No, click out from our website to theirs.

Gotcha. Okay.

We do a cost per click and we do cost per lead. So we can also capture like a booking inquiry and send a lead to our partners. They would rather do that.

Gotcha. So for your distribution, are you a hundred percent a content player? How else are you acquiring customers?

Yeah, like it's not your B2B customers, but how are you driving traveler eyes to your users?

Yeah. Like, I don't know exactly what it is. The high 80s percent of our new users are coming from Google organic.
And we've got a lot of retention. We're quite good with our email. So we get obviously, although we are positioned in that sort of lower end of the funnel, you know, not everyone is ready to click off to a supplier, to a travel partner so we get people onto our email list and we're quite good with that. So our retention, this is one of the key concepts behind the entire idea is once you have expressed an interest in going trekking in Bhutan, we can be pretty confident that you might be interested in going trekking in Nepal next year or trekking in Peru or trekking in wherever it may be, right? And our partners are generally single destination partners. So you spend all that money acquiring a customer for to go trekking in Nepal and you'll only ever use that customer once. We kind of unlock that lifetime value.

So it's a matter of segmentation based on interests and retargeting based on interest with emails, only email sounds like right now, right?

Yeah. We used to do when we were still a VC business, we spent ungodly amounts of money on Google PPC ourselves.

That seems ironic.

Yeah. Like when I had investors breathing down my neck and growth targets to hit, we threw a lot of money at Google to do that. And one of the things I'm most happy about is that we no longer have to do that.

How'd you get out of that cycle?

We bought, COVID was a weird blessing in a very big disguise for us. And it ended up with us having the opportunity to buy out our investors.

Gotcha. That happened in a number of businesses.

Right.

I don't know which ones I'm allowed to mention, so I'm just not going to mention any of them because I've had that conversation with a number of people like discount acquisitions during the pandemic being a significant force multiplier in their business.

Obviously it was awful. I mean, it sounds facetious to say for a lot of our partners and advertisers, it was catastrophic.

Yeah.

The way the timing of our fundraise work was we were quite fortunate because we had a pile of cash when COVID started. We were able to just put our heads down and keep building and not worry about sales and then when people started to realize just how long this pandemic was going to last, our investors eventually got bored and let us buy them out for not a huge amount of money.

Yeah, I gotcha. Okay, so you are a content marketer, that is what you sound like. Like you know how to do content and make it work. We have a bunch of marketers of varying levels from marketing coordinator up to VP of marketing, CMO, listening to this show, as well as a bunch of operators.
If you were to like to share a couple of core tenants of content marketing, some of the things that you've learned that work versus don't work, what would you include in that list? I know that that puts you on the spot a little bit, but what else is this podcast for if not putting people on the spot?

I told you it was late here.

I know.

But fortunately I've been asked this question a few times. First of all, I think I'm very reluctant to share personal stories and present it as universal advice.

Thank you.

Worked for us, or actually more often than not, didn't work for us, didn't work for us. So some of the things like probably if you want to start with something that we might have done differently, that list is quite a big list. I think probably we should have got started. We shouldn't have overlooked the top of the funnel. We kind of wrote the top, we wrote that off and we said it wasn't what we do almost in an obby kind of way, like that kind of Instagram approach to travel. We started as a response. I looked at like what travel bloggers used to be and said, we could do this so much better than and travel bloggers and now travel bloggers are actually like the good guys. And it's like, then it was the Instagram influencers and now it's just LLMs.
Yeah, like the top social probably should have started to build that reach when back when we first started. So this is the one thing that we have done right. I'd like to claim it as some sort of genius credit move, but it's really not. It's just time.
If you want to be a content driven search driven business, you've just got to put in the hard work and do it for long enough. It's only really like in the last couple of years that our traffic, organic traffic has started to make it a viable business. That's why we were spending so much on search on PPC paid search. So like, I think that's just longevity and patience and stubbornness and everything else. You just got to do that for long enough and without seeing any results for long enough. And it's, that's a, that's a very hard thing to ask a business to do.

Yeah.

I mean, that was a very hard thing for us to ask our investors to do. They were getting very impatient.

I'm sure you got to decide if you're going to be a rapid scale up. And if that's the case, you got to use paid media or if you're going to be a slow burn growth organization and a mix, but you're speaking exactly about, you know, one of my core pillars, I mean, the core pillars of our performance bookings methodology is, is really channel diversity. It's make sure that you're not going too deep into one sole channel, especially organic sometimes because it can hurt you. It can bite you in the butt very quickly.

Right. And I think like the big risk to us now, there's no getting a beating around the bush, what is going to happen to search in the next year to five years and beyond that.

Yeah.

There are a lot of opinions flirting around. No one really knows, but there are lots of interesting signals bubbling away, right? Google has rode right, right back from what they were trailing with the search generous experience at first, that whole thing and sure yet it will evolve and, and they will, as people get softened up and more used to this sort of stuff, maybe.
But it's encouraging for me to see that people want to hear from people, especially in the sort of category of travel that we do. And I don't doubt that I can hear Christian Watts now giving the counter-argument to that, give it time. You know, this is still the very start of this process. But I think there's always going to be a percentage of people and also a percentage of the content that deserves to be created by people, might be 95% of the content that could be automated. There's always gonna be whatever that percentage is, 5% of the content that deserves to be created by people and that's the stuff that we will focus on.

Well, and that's again, that's same with us here on the B2B side. We're in our marketing invisibility. It's, you know, what I can't trust a LLM to do is create a marketing methodology based on, you know, cases of things that have worked that we see. I mean, I guess you can drop a lot of that in and say what's working here. But even so, it's pattern recognition that you get from being a human that helps.

Yeah, that's the ironic thing because that's one of the examples that people come up with. You can use ChatGPT to create your entire marketing plan for so and so on. You can use ChatGPT to create and replicate someone else's marketing plan. What is one thing that you haven't shared that you'd like to share?

I don't know if I've got an easy answer to that. I think probably if you want it like an honest behind the sort of curtain view of a business like ours, like it's hard work, we're tiny team, we never regain the head count after COVID.

Sure.

And we do a lot of stuff in a fairly slow methodical way. And there are lots of things about our product that ought to be like, you know, this, we've always known that we need to charge variable rates on the clicks. And that's always something that we intend to get around to more operations. You've always, you've just got more stuff to do.
Yeah. Overall, it's just like if a business wanted to do what we were doing for themselves, it's just like a 10 year project. And that's not an exaggeration. And this is why I don't think I would offend you because you work with bigger organizations where SEO is a viable channel, but for lots of people.

Yeah. Say what you're saying. I'm going to probably just agree with it and repeat it. Go for it.

Right. For lots of people, there's a big myth out there that these channels, this was true before AI hit the scenes, but these channels are viable channels for everyone. I don't think that's necessarily the case. Like it's borderline impossible for a smaller operator to break into some of the higher competition travel search type keywords.

So what I will say around that is, we just hired a salesperson. One of the questions that anybody processes who's not qualified for SEO. And you know, the half a million dollar a year operator in a single destination with tour radar, trip advisor ranking for their target terms, they're going to struggle to break through there. Paid media could work.

Yeah.

Paid can work because you buy in and test it and SEO can work in a lot of cases, but it might not be the best allocation of funds.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. A hundred percent agree.

We have partners come to us, advertisers come to me all the time and say, you know, I've got this, someone wants to do some SEO work for me. What do you think to this? And I look at it and I say, all you need to do is ask, right? You've got, like you say, Tour Radar, TripAdvisor, half a dozen of the big global brands, the multi-day tour operator, travel agent type brands that are present for pretty much every keyword. Ask your SEO, what levers they will pull to make your website outrank any of those websites.
And if there's no convincing answer, which spoiler alert, there is no convincing answer because it can't be done on a meaningful timeframe or with realistic resources.

I'll argue that we've done it.

Right. I'm talking about, yeah…

Give you about 40 terms in which a 20 person operation outranks the destination marketing organization for the target term.

Yeah.

We do that pretty frequently, but again, it's more risky. I wouldn't say you can't make it happen. I would say it's more risky. It's less certain and it's very expensive in time considering. So SEO is great for multi.

Yeah. And like you say, is there something better to spend that money on?

Exactly. That's the question. It's, I mean, like SEO is a viable channel for a lot of businesses, but are they going to stick with it long enough to see it? Are they going to have enough resources to drive an outcome? Are they focused enough to where they're not targeting a head term with 400,000 searches a month. That's a very important term for other large brands. So yeah, appreciate all the time today.

Last question I like to, like I ask everybody that comes on the podcast is where are you traveling next?

We are going to the seaside in a couple of weeks. My wife is from the States and her parents are going to be visiting. And we're going to take them to the British seaside and I'm hoping that by then the rain has stopped.

I hope so too for you. We'll see. It's wet and cold in England. Well, yeah, I appreciate it, Matt. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me. This is awesome. Yeah. You have a good rest of your night. Speak to you soon. Bye.

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